Monday, December 1, 2014

Tilting at Windmills

In honor of the youth of the world, I will be silent on December 10. I will wear a green wristband, take a picture, and send it to www.climatesilencenow.org.I will do it even though, as the following essay from TransitionMilwaukee demonstrates, it IS impossible to avert a horrendous crash. The author ably demolishes the pet fantasies of climate activists for a green high-tech society, despite the obligatory hopium tacked on in the last section. We are not, as he asserts, on the "brink" of the 6th mass extinction - it is well underway. In fact, the case can easily be made that it began over 10,000 years ago when homo eradicatus extirpated dozens of species of megafauna, thus altering the entire ecosystems by disrupting everything from seed disbursal to precipitation.The exhortation to Americans to consume less won't be enough to avert the climate catastrophe that is already irreversible, even if "making substantial changes in the way you live" also includes forgoing light and heat and food from the grocery store, wearing only clothing woven from homespun yarn, and refraining from even so much as an aspirin for the sick...because all those basic goods and services - food, electricity, clothing and medical care, to say nothing of travel and electronics - only exist in quantities sufficient for billions of people because they are derived from a globally industrialized civilization powered by fossil fuels. No one is going to willingly give those up, thus nothing substantive has been or will be done.We cannot have a "revolution" against ourselves.

Earth Day, 1972

But I will be silent on December 10 anyway - why not - make a meaningless gesture for all the bewildered and frightened children who will inherit these wrecked oceans and ruined lands.If the world population is not stabilized… nothing but pain and grief will follow. The future will then indeed be based on our cries of agony. ~ Sir Fred Hoyle, 1963

Tilting at Windmills ~ Gustave Doré (1863)

Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question

By Erik Lindberg

Myth #1: Liberals Are Not In Denial

“We will not apologize for our way of life” –Barack Obama

The conservative denial of the very fact of climate change looms large in the minds of many liberals. How, we ask, could people ignore so much solid and unrefuted evidence? Will they deny the existence of fire as Rome burns once again? With so much at stake, this denial is maddening, indeed. But almost never discussed is an unfortunate side-effect of this denial: it has all but insured that any national debate in America will occur in a place where most liberals are not required to challenge any of their own beliefs. The question has been reduced to a two-sided affair—is it happening or is it not—and liberals are obviously on the right side of that.

If we broadened the debate just a little bit, however, we would see that most liberals have just moved a giant boat-load of denial down-stream, and that this denial is as harmful as that of conservatives. While the various aspects of liberal denial are my main overall topic, here, and will be addressed in our following five sections, they add up to the belief that we can avoid the most catastrophic levels of climate disruption without changing our fundamental way of life. This is myth is based on errors that are as profound and basic as the conservative denial of climate change itself.

But before moving on, one more point about liberal and conservative denial: Naomi Klein has suggested that conservative denial may have its roots, it will surprise many liberals, in some pretty clear thinking. [i] At some level, she has observed, conservatives climate deniers understand that addressing climate change will, in fact, change our way of life, a way of life which conservatives often view as sacred. This sort of change is so terrifying and unthinkable to them, she argues, that they cut the very possibility of climate change off at its knees: fighting climate change would force us to change our way of life; our way of life is sacred and cannot be questioned; ergo, climate change cannot be happening.

We have a situation, then, where one half of the population says it is not happening, and the other half says it is happening but fighting it doesn’t have to change our way of life. Like a dysfunctional and enabling married couple, the bickering and finger-pointing, and anger ensures that nothing has to change and that no one has to actually look deeply at themselves, even as the wheels are falling off the family-life they have co-created. And so do Democrats and Republicans stay together in this unhappy and unproductive place of emotional self-protection and planetary ruin.

Myth #2: Republicans are Still More to Blame

“Yes, America does face a cliff -- not a fiscal cliff but a set of precipices [including a carbon cliff] we'll tumble over because the GOP's obsession over government's size and spending has obscured them.” -Robert Reich

It is true that conservative politicians in the United States and Europe have been intent on blocking international climate agreements; but by focusing on these failed agreements, which only require a baby-step in the right direction, liberals obliquely side-step the actual cause of global warming—namely, burning fossil fuels. The denial of climate change isn’t responsible for the fact that we, in the United States, are responsible for about one quarter of all current emissions if you include the industrial products we consume (and an even greater percentage of all emissions over time), even though we make up only 6% of the world’s population. Our high-consumption lifestyles are responsible for this. Republicans do not emit an appreciably larger amount of carbon dioxide than Democrats.

Because pumping gasoline is our most direct connection to the burning of fossil fuels, most Americans overemphasize the significance of what sort of car we drive and many liberals might proudly point to their small economical cars or undersized SUVs. While the transportation sector is responsible for a lot of our emissions, the carbon footprint of any one individual has much more to do with his or her overall levels of consumption of all kinds—the travel (especially on airplanes), the hotels and restaurants, the size and number of homes, the computers and other electronics, the recreational equipment and gear, the food, the clothes, and all the other goods, services, and amenities that accompany an affluent life. It turns out that the best predictor of someone’s carbon footprint is income. This is true whether you are comparing yourself to other Americans or to other people around the world. Middle-class American professionals, academics, and business-people are among the world’s greatest carbon emitters and, as a group, are more responsible than any other single group for global warming, especially if we focus on discretionary consumption. Accepting the fact of climate change, but then jetting off to the tropics, adding another oversized television to the collection, or buying a new Subaru involves a tremendous amount of denial. There are no carbon offsets for ranting and raving about conservative climate-change deniers.

Myth #3: Renewable Energy Can Replace Fossil Fuels

“We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” –Barack Obama

This is a hugely important point. Everything else hinges on the myth that we might live a lifestyle similar to our current one powered by wind, solar, and biofuels. Like the conservative belief that climate change cannot be happening, liberals believe that renewable energy must be a suitable replacement. Neither view is particularly concerned with the evidence.

Conventional wisdom among American liberals assures us that we would be well on our way to a clean, green, low-carbon, renewable energy future were it not for the lobbying efforts of big oil companies and their Republican allies. The truth is far more inconvenient than this: it will be all but impossible for our current level of consumption to be powered by anything but fossil fuels. The liberal belief that energy sources such as wind, solar, and biofuels can replace oil, natural gas, and coal is a mirror image of the conservative denial of climate change: in both cases an overriding belief about the way the world works, or should work, is generally far stronger than any evidence one might present. Denial is the biggest game in town. Denial, as well as a misunderstanding about some fundamental features of energy, is what allows someone like Bill Gates assume that “an energy miracle” will be created with enough R & D. Unfortunately, the lessons of microprocessors do not teach us anything about replacing oil, coal, and natural gas.

It is of course true that solar panels and wind turbines can create electricity, and that ethanol and bio-diesel can power many of our vehicles, and this does lend a good bit of credibility to the claim that a broader transition should be possible—if we can only muster the political will and finance the necessary research. But this view fails to take into account both the limitations of renewable energy and the very specific qualities of the fossil fuels around which we’ve built our way of life. The myth that alternative sources of energy are perfectly capable of replacing fossil fuels and thus of maintaining our current way of life receives widespread support from our President to leading public intellectuals to most mainstream journalists, and receives additional backing from our self-image as a people so ingenious that there are no limits to what we can accomplish. That fossil fuels have provided us with a one-time burst of unrepeatable energy and affluence (and ecological peril) flies in the face of nearly all the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Just starting to dispel this myth requires that I go into the issue a bit more deeply and at greater length

Because we have come to take the power and energy-concentration of fossil fuels for granted, and see our current lifestyle as normal, it is easy to ignore the way the average citizens of industrialized societies have an unprecedented amount of energy at their disposal. Consider this for a moment: a single $3 gallon of gasoline provides the equivalent of about 80 days of hard manual labor. Fill up your 15 gallon gas tank in your car, and you’ve just bought the same amount of energy that would take over three years of unremitting manual labor to reproduce. Americans use more energy in a month than most of our great-grandparents used during their whole lifetime. We live at a level, today, that in previous days could have only been supported by about 150 slaves for every American—though even that understates it, because we are at the same time beneficiaries of a societal infrastructure that is also only possible to create if we have seemingly limitless quantities of lightweight, relatively stable, easily transportable, and extremely inexpensive ready-to-burn fuel like oil or coal.

A single, small, and easily portable gallon of oil is the product of nearly 100 tons of surface-forming algae (imagine 5 dump trucks full of the stuff), which first collected enormous amounts of solar radiation before it was condensed, distilled, and pressure cooked for a half-billion years—and all at no cost to the humans who have come to depend on this concentrated energy. There is no reason why we should be able to manufacture at a reasonable cost anything comparable. And when we look at the specific qualities of renewable energy with any degree of detail we quickly see that we have not. Currently only about a half of a percent of the total energy used in the United States is generated by wind, solar, biofuels, or geothermal heat. The global total is not much higher, despite the much touted efforts in Germany, Spain, and now China. In 2013, 1.1% of the world’s total energy was provided by wind and only 0.2% by solar.[ii] As these low numbers suggest, one of the major limitations of renewable energy has to do with scale, whether we see this as a limitation in renewable energy itself, or remind ourselves that the expectations that fossil fuels have helped establish are unrealistic and unsustainable.

University of California physics professor Tom Murphy has provided detailed calculations about many of the issues of energy scale in his blog, “Do the Math.” With the numbers adding up, we are no longer able to wave the magic wand of our faith in our own ingenuity and declare the solar future would be here, but for those who refuse to give in the funding it is due. Consider a few representative examples: most of us have, for instance, heard at some point the sort of figure telling us that enough sun strikes the Earth every 104 minutes to power the entire world for a year. But this only sounds good if you don’t perform any follow-up calculations. As Murphy puts it,

As reassuring as this picture is, the photovoltaic area [required] represents more than all the paved area in the world. This troubles me. I’ve criss-crossed the country many times now, and believe me, there is a lot of pavement. The paved infrastructure reflects a tremendous investment that took decades to build. And we’re talking about asphalt and concrete here: not high-tech semiconductor. I truly have a hard time grasping the scale such a photovoltaic deployment would represent. And I’m not even addressing storage here.” [iii]

In another post,[iv] Murphy calculates that a battery capable of storing this electricity in the U.S. alone (otherwise no electricity at night or during cloudy or windless spells) would require about three times as much lead as geologists estimate may exist in all reserves, most of which remain unknown. If you count only the lead that we’ve actually discovered, Murphy explains, we only have 2% of the lead available for our national battery project. The number are even more disheartening if you try to substitute lithium ion or other systems now only in the research phase. The same story holds true for just about all the sources that even well-informed people assume are ready to replace fossil fuels, and which pundits will rattle off in an impressively long list with impressive sounding numbers of kilowatt hours produced. Add them all up--even increase the efficiency to unanticipated levels and assume a limitless budget--and you will naturally have some big-sounding numbers; but then compare them to our current energy appetite, and you quickly see that we still run out of space, vital minerals and other raw materials, and in the meantime would probably have strip-mined a great deal of precious farmland, changed the earth’s wind patterns, and have affected the weather or other ecosystems in ways not yet imagined.

But the most significant limitation of fossil fuel’s alleged clean, green replacements has to do with the laws of physics and the way energy, itself, works. A brief review of the way energy does what we want it to do will also help us see why it takes so many solar panels or wind turbines to do the work that a pickup truck full of coal or a small tank of crude oil can currently accomplish without breaking a sweat. When someone tells us of the fantastic amounts of solar radiation that beats down on the Earth each day, we are being given a meaningless fact. Energy doesn’t do work; only concentrated energy does work, and only while it is going from its concentrated state to a diffuse state—sort of like when you let go of a balloon and it flies around the room until its pressurized (or concentrated) air has joined the remaining more diffuse air in the room.

When we build wind turbines and solar panels, or grow plants that can be used for biofuels, we are “manually” concentrating the diffuse energy of the sun or in the wind—a task, not incidentally, that requires a good deal of energy. The reason why these efforts, as impressive as they are, pale in relationship to fossil fuels has to do simply with the fact that we are attempting to do by way of a some clever engineering and manufacturing (and a considerable amount of energy) what the geology of the Earth did for free, but, of course, over a period of half a billion years with the immense pressures of the planet’s shifting tectonic plates or a hundred million years of sedimentation helping us out. The “normal” society all of us have grown up with is a product of this one-time burst of a pre-concentrated, ready-to-burn fuel source. It has provided us with countless wonders; but used without limits, it is threatening all life as we know it.

Myth 4:The Coming “Knowledge Economy” Will be a Low-Energy Economy

"The basic economic resource - the means of production - is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor. It is and will be knowledge." -Peter Drucker

“The economy of the last century was primarily based on natural resources, industrial machines and manual labor. . . . Today’s economy is very different. It is based primarily on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone.” -Mark Zuckerberg

A “low energy knowledge economy,” when promised by powerful people like Barack Obama, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg, may still our fears about our current ecological trajectory. At a gut level this vision of the future may match the direct experience of many middle-class American liberals. Your father worked in a smelting factory; you spend your day behind a laptop computer, which can, in fact, be run on a very small amount of electricity. Your carbon footprint must be lower, right? Companies like Apple and Microsoft round out this hopeful fantasy with their clever and inspiring advertisements featuring children in Africa or China joining this global knowledge economy as they crowd cheerfully around a computer in some picturesque straw-hut school room.

But there’s a big problem with this picture. This global economy may seem like it needs little more than an army of creative innovators and entrepreneurs tapping blithely on laptop computers at the local Starbucks. But the real global economy still requires a growing fleet of container ships—and, of course, all the iron and steel used to build them, all the excavators used to mine it, all the asphalt needed to pave more of the world. It needs a bigger and bigger fleet of UPS trucks and Fed Ex airplanes filling the skies with more and more carbon dioxide, it needs more paper, more plastic, more nickel, copper, and lead. It requires food, bottled water, and of course lots and lots of coffee. And more oil, coal, and natural gas. As Juliet Schor reports, each American consumer requires “132,000 pounds of oil, sand, grain, iron ore, coal and wood” to maintain our current lifestyle each year. That adds up to “an eye-popping 362 pounds a day.”[v] And the gleeful African kids that Apple asks us to imagine joining the global economy? They are far more likely to slave away in a gold mine or sift through junk hauled across the Atlantic looking for recyclable materials, than they are to be device-sporting global entrepreneurs. The Microsoft ads are designed for us, not them. Meanwhile, the numbers Schor reports are not going down in the age of “the global knowledge economy,” a term which should be consigned to history’s dustbin of misleading marketing slogans.

The “dematerialized labor” that accounts for the daily toil of the American middle class is, in fact, the clerical, management and promotional sector of an industrial machine that is still as energy-intensive and material-based as it ever was. Only now, much of the sooty and smelly part has been off-shored to places far, far away from the people who talk hopefully about a coming global knowledge economy. We like to pretend that the rest of the world can live like us, and we have certainly done our best to advertise, loan, seduce, and threaten people across the world to adopt our style, our values, and our wants. But someone still has to do the smelting, the welding, the sorting, and run the ceaseless production lines. And, moreover, if everyone lived like we do, took our vacations, drove our cars, ate our food, lived in our houses, filled them with oversized TVs and the endless array of throwaway gadgetry, the world would use four times as much energy and emit nearly four times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. If even half the world’s population were to consume like we do, we would have long since barreled by the ecological point of no-return.

Economists speak reverently of a decoupling between economic growth and carbon emissions, but this decoupling is occurring at a far slower rate than the economy is growing. There has never been any global economic growth that is not also accompanied by increased energy use and carbon emissions. The onlyyearly decreases in emissions ever recorded have come during massive recessions.

Myth 5: We can Reverse Global Warming Without Changing our Current Lifestyles

“Saving the planet would be cheap; it might even be free. . . . [It] would have hardly any negative effect on economic growth, and might actually lead to faster growth” –Paul Krugman

The upshot of the previous sections is that the comforts, luxuries, privileges, and pleasures that we tell ourselves are necessary for a happy or satisfying life are the most significant cause of global warming and that unless we quickly learn to organize our lives around another set of pleasures and satisfactions, it is extremely unlikely that our children or grandchildren will inherit a livable planet. Because we are falsely reassured by liberal leaders that we can fight climate change without any inconvenience, it bears repeating this seldom spoken truth. In order to adequately address climate change, people in rich industrial nations will have to reduce current levels of consumption to levels few are prepared to consider. This truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.[vi]

Global warming is not complicated: it is caused mainly by burning fossil fuels; fossil fuels are burned in the greatest quantity by wealthy people and nations and for the products they buy and use. The larger the reach of a middle-class global society, the more carbon emissions there have been. While conservatives deny the science of global warming, liberals deny the only real solution to preventing its most horrific consequences—using less and powering down, perhaps starting with the global leaders in style and taste (as well as emissions), the American middle-class. In the meantime we continue to pump more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with each passing year.

Myth 6: There is Nothing I Can Do.

The problem is daunting; making changes can be difficult.[vii] But not only can you do something, you can’t not do anything. Either you will continue to buy, use, and consume as if there is no tomorrow; or you will make substantial changes to the way you live. Both choices are “doing something.” Either you will emit far more CO2 than people in most parts of the globe; or you will bring your carbon footprint to an equitable level. Either you will turn away, ignore the warnings, bury your head in the sand; or you will begin to take a strong stance on perhaps the most significant moral challenge in the history of humanity. Either you will be a willing party to the most destructive thing humans have ever done; or you will resist the wants, the beliefs, and the expectations that are as important to a consumption-based global economy as the fossil fuels that power it. As Americans we have already done just about everything possible to bring the planet to the brink of what scientists are now calling “the sixth great extinction.” We can either keep on doing more of the same; or we can work to undo the damage we have done and from which we have most benefitted.

[vii] Making changes is especially difficult to do alone. Fortunately, community efforts such as Transition Towns are popping up around the globe, giving people both practical help and the emotional support necessary to tackle such a large task.

19 comments:

Wow Gail - this was a great read. There are so many facts that point to the conclusion that fossil fuel use is directly leading to our short-term demise (naming a few: the pollution from its continued use is what's driving climate change and therefore killing the very ecosystems we depend on for survival; it's a finite resource which has peaked like so many others and the economics of not only it, but also civilization as a whole is rapidly falling apart - it's unsustainable) that we're all going to "get it" very soon. Another point to be made is that none of this makes any difference to our continuing species survival once our habitat is gone (past a certain, rapidly approaching point of no return). When there's no food or water, money, fuel, electricity, computing power, solar energy, all of our history, all of our so-called "knowledge" vanishes as quickly as any bad idea.

At this point we're waiting for the thud of hitting the wall (or the bottom of the cliff). We're analogously running around on the Titanic as it's sinking, doing our little meaningless activities (wasting energy) until we can't.

Thanks Tom! For a fantastic, deep perspective on human impacts to the environment, check out this article on soil erosion, which has terrific links to free book downloads on the topic - http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-12-01/soil-erosion-may-get-us-before-climate-change-does

Gail, I think you are sorely in need of a LONG, and perhaps long overdue, period of R&R!! When I was young, at appropriate times my parents would admonish me with "We expect you to KNOW better!" Subsequently, they would prescribe a mandatory period of hours, sometimes days, deemed a time for reflection. While I sincerely doubt you require much, if any, reflection, I have no doubt that a period of joyful exuberance would refine your perspective.

"people" just don't/can't understand that it is totally abnormal for trees to fall, even in strong winds. because they do not and will not know how sick all the trees are, they think that they always fell in bad weather, which of course is completely false. baseline seems to be so highly fluid! http://www.nbcmontana.com/news/falling-trees-damage-homes-at-glacier-national-park/29994328

What a perfect example. There will be so many, many more. I will probably post this eventually but in case I don't, check it out - What he says about climate change being the wrong focus, and an excuse for inaction on saving coral reefs is such an exact parallel with the destruction of forests, which are being killed by logging and pollution, just as the reefs are being killed by overfishing and pollution. It is so sad in both instances, because much could be done to save both reefs and forests, at least for a while - if people correctly diagnosed the sources of the threats...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0veoSBG3os

That presentation by Dr. Jackson was VERY, exceedingly, extremely interesting!!! Pretty much elucidates that Walt Kelly was prescient so many years ago. (Not to mention the Club of Rome's work, with which many jackasses still take umbrage.) "We" are death and destruction incarnate... well, except for a vanishingly few of us.The "slate" of the Earth will, and should be, wiped clean to allow "nature" another chance to engender an "intelligent" species. The "problem" is NOT "too many people," it's too many GDF* "believers," too many "stupid" people. For clarity's sake, by "stupid" I mean "ignorant, ill-informed and irrational BELIEVERS!" Alas and of course, all of those moronic miscreants BELIEVE they "have a REAL GOOD bead on things."

*GDF - goddamnedfucking, i.e. useless to the point of not even serving well as a "bad" example, e.g. 80+% of "humans."

I have been wondering today, ColinC - are we one of many living planets in the universe? If so, do they all end in ignominious overshoot? If not, where are they? OR, are we utterly unique - the one experiment that is lurching, willy-nilly, towards oblivion?

Those are some of the "great(?)" cosmological questions in certain philosophical venues. However, if an "open-minded person" (good luck finding more than a few) considers just the vast array of anecdotal "evidence," such as the myriad UFO sightings from around the world (not ALL being "equal") as well as some other issues presented by von Daniken and others, I think one would be hard-pressed to presume that "humans" are "unique," alone, or even "special" in the vast expanse that is deemed "The Universe." It is a sad fact that most of the allegedly "intelligent" lifeforms on Earth cannot even imagine, let alone "comprehend," other similar beings and their manners of living beyond what they, themselves manifest or have been "programmed" to exhibit. I think you would agree that therein exists one of the fundamental roots of conflict, not to mention anthropomorphism. Too many inhabitants of this rock still, at least subconsciously, BELIEVE that Earth IS the "center" of the aforementioned "Universe" even if they accept that this rock orbits its Sun rather than vice-versa. Even too many "smart people," with more than a few "academic titles," are overly convinced of their own perspectives which remain anomalous in many, if not most, other "social circles" around even this world. It IS difficult, i.e. requires sincere "effort," to imagine what "living" is like "in someone else's shoes." Too many are unwilling to even consider such effort, let alone endeavor to undertake the challenge. Personally, having been "dirt poor" (not sure when or where my next meal would occur) as well as having a "comfortable" income ($50+K/yr) and "everywhere" in between, I think it is highly likely that "we" are in a sort-of "Day the Earth Stood Still" situation in which any potential "non-terrestrials" are observing Earthly events and wondering if "we" are "worthy," or merely a nuisance that should be allowed to self-destruct, saving them the trouble. "Enlightenment" has been manifest in far too few and even many of "them" still cling obsessively to too many age-old and deep-seated "superstitions" (so much so that those "beliefs" are inadmissible). One thing is certain though, a hundred years from now (perhaps less) neither you nor I will know the difference! :)

Hi Gail, I've had trouble finding good charts or data that focus on the ambient/average/background levels of Ozone and how they have changed over time in the US. There is lots of data for peak ozone levels, but that's not the main concern, right? These charts from Canada are ok. http://www.ec.gc.ca/indicateurs-indicators/default.asp?lang=en&n=9EBBCA88-1 They show annual average concentrations as well as peak concentrations. Note the annual averages stay constant, even as peak concentrations go down. The last two charts feature trendlines showing average concentrations rising (.8% per year in British Columbia, not surprising) as peak concentrations stay constant. Can you point me to any charts or data for the US? Just data is fine - I'm pretty handy with charting software if there is a need to visualize the data clearly.

Hi Charles. I am packing for a trip so I don’t have a lot of time, but here are some links you might find useful - I will post them separately as blogger has limits to comment size…there is a chart here:http://libra.msra.cn/Publication/40722235/new-directions-implications-of-increasing-tropospheric-background-ozone-concentrations-forTypically, you can write to the lead author and ask for a pdf of their paper when it is behind a paywall and they usually are happy to send it. In fact, I may write them myself it looks very good.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7279/full/nature08708.html

In the lowermost layer of the atmosphere—the troposphere—ozone is an important source of the hydroxyl radical, an oxidant that breaks down most pollutants and some greenhouse gases1. High concentrations of tropospheric ozone are toxic, however, and have a detrimental effect on human health and ecosystem productivity1. Moreover, tropospheric ozone itself acts as an effective greenhouse gas2. Much of the present tropospheric ozone burden is a consequence of anthropogenic emissions of ozone precursors3 resulting in widespread increases in ozone concentrations since the late 1800s3, 4, 5, 6, 7. At present, east Asia has the fastest-growing ozone precursor emissions8. Much of the springtime east Asian pollution is exported eastwards towards western North America9. Despite evidence that the exported Asian pollution produces ozone10, no previous study has found a significant increase in free tropospheric ozone concentrations above the western USA since measurements began in the late 1970s5, 11, 12. Here we compile springtime ozone measurements from many different platforms across western North America. We show a strong increase in springtime ozone mixing ratios during 1995–2008 and we have some additional evidence that a similar rate of increase in ozone mixing ratio has occurred since 1984. We find that the rate of increase in ozone mixing ratio is greatest when measurements are more heavily influenced by direct transport from Asia. Our result agrees with previous modelling studies, which indicate that global ozone concentrations should be increasing during the early part of the twenty-first century as a result of increasing precursor emissions, especially at northern mid-latitudes13, with western North America being particularly sensitive to rising Asian emissions14. We suggest that the observed increase in springtime background ozone mixing ratio may hinder the USA’s compliance with its ozone air quality standard.

Comparisons of ozone levels with those measured over a century ago indicate that current levels have increased by approximately two times. Although current trends are not uniform, there is some indication that background ozone levels over the midlatitudes of the NorthernHemisphere have continued to rise over the past three decades, and that this rise has been in the range of approximately 0.5–2% per year. Rising trends were steeper in the 1970s and 1980s compared to the 1990s, which have seen either a leveling off or a decline in the magnitude of these trends. Model sensitivity studies indicate that the rise in NOx emissions account for the greatest increase in background ozone levels over the past three decades. A substantialcomponent of the background ozone concentration in western North America may be due to long-range transport of Asian pollution, especially during the spring months. Model projections using IPCC emission scenarios for the 21st century indicate that background ozone may rise to levels that would exceed internationally accepted environmental criteria for human health and the environment.

Ozone has been recognised as a significant local and regionalair quality issue for many years due to the impacts of high O3episodes on human health and crops. These episodes, duringwhich O3 concentrations may peak at 200 parts per billion byvolume1 (ppb) or more, occur in polluted regions underhot and sunny conditions. O3 is also present at backgroundconcentrations (refer Box 1.1) which vary geographically,and throughout the year. Between the late 19th century and1980, concentrations of background O3 in the NorthernHemisphere mid-latitudes doubled to about 30–35 ppb andhave since increased by another 5 ppb to 35–40 ppb. Impactson human health and vegetation during high O3 episodes arewell established; however there is increasing evidence of effectsat background concentrations leading to concerns about theimplications of further increases in background O3. The causeof the increase in background O3 is not fully understood but isthought to be due mainly to be due mainly to increases in emissions in Northern Hemisphere countries, from poorly regulated sectors such asinternational shipping and aviation, and possibly also due toan increase in O3 from the stratosphere. Ozone can no longerbe considered a local air quality issue – it is a global problem,requiring a global solution.The focus of this study is on tropospheric O3 (refer Box 1.1).Ozone was selected because it remains one of the mostimportant of the global air pollutants in terms of impacts tohuman health, croplands and natural plant communities, andmay become more important in the future. Despite efforts tocontrol O3, background concentrations in the northernhemisphere have more than doubled to 35–40 ppb since theindustrial revolution, and peak values continue to exceed theWHO guideline values of 50 ppb in many countries, includingLatin America, North America, Europe and Africa (WHO2006).

The projected levels of o3 are critically alarming, and have become a major issue of concern for food security.

Interview with John Reilly of MIT about the threshold for ozone damage to plants (40 ppb):http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=08-P13-00011&segmentID=2

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalTraveler/The lifetime of ozone’s precursors in the troposphere is sufficiently long that they can produce ozone hundreds or even thousands of miles away before further chemical reactions transform ozone into oxygen and other chemicals...

Other major air circulation patterns appear to carry ozone from one continent to another. Although a complete, detailed, global picture of how natural and human activities on one continent influence the air quality over other continents and oceans requires more research, some trends are becoming clearer. According to modeling studies at Harvard University, background concentrations (amounts that are usually there) of ozone in surface air over the United States range from 25 to 55 parts of ozone per billion parts of air (ppb) and can be largely attributed to transport from outside the United States. This amount of ozone is significant for a country where the national air quality standard is 80 ppb over 8 hours, not to be exceeded more than three times per year. The same Harvard study had implications particularly for the western part of North America, which receives more pollution from Asia than the eastern part does. In fact, if people in North America succeeded in reducing their emissions of nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons (ozone precursors) by 25 percent, the expected tripling of Asian emissions by 2010 could more than offset that North American effort."

Transcribed portions of Jack Fishman’s book “Global Alert” with a video of his talk titled “Are We Creating a Toxic Atmosphere” from Dec. 2013: http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2014/07/there-goes-neighborhood.html direct link to his talk here (at 20 minutes in the answer is “yes” - the slide says “for certain plants and crops, evidence shows that these species cannot live as robustly in the atmosphere of the 21st century as they did before the onset of the Anthropocene because of the INCREASE OF BACKGROUND LEVELS OF TROPOSPHERIC OZONE”.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_gw5gKJtGM

And then, there is PAN, it’s relationship to ozone and detrimental effect on vegetation - http://storm.colorado.edu//~toohey/PAN.pdf

Notice that the government mandated the addition of ethanol to gasoline shortly before the truly dramatic decline in trees commenced, and the slide presentation says: “Studies suggest that using blended gasoline with ethanol increases PAN; NOx increases with 10% ethanol.” - and also, it is transported from Asia to the US…and also the difficulties in measuring it.

More on PAN formation: http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/14/2679/2014/acp-14-2679-2014.html

In their quest to enact stricter regulations for ozone, EPA recognizes that the background level from transboundary pollution is a problem so they are prepared to make exemptions for areas that cannot maintain compliance, see their recent publication http://www.epa.gov/groundlevelozone/pdfs/20141125fs-tools.pdf and http://www.epa.gov/groundlevelozone/pdfs/20141203-background-ozone-states.pdf

take a look at the 3-year average by county in the US - http://www.epa.gov/groundlevelozone/pdfs/20141126-20112013datatable.pdf